"Literalness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 1752, were more purely stories of broadly comic adventure than Fielding's. The latter's view of life was by no means idyllic; but with Smollett this English realism ran into vulgarity and a hard Scotch literalness, and character was pushed to caricature. "The generous wine of Fielding," says Taine, "in Smollett's hands becomes brandy of the dram-shop." A partial exception to this is to be found in his last and best novel, Humphrey Clinker, 1770. The influence of Cervantes ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... sticking manfully to his own opinion. "Where will you find a more decided mannerist than Holbein? And because he was the first portrait-painter of his day, was he not reproduced with all his faults of literalness and dryness by a legion of imitators? So with Sir Peter Lely, with Petitot, with Vandyck, with every great artist who painted kings and queens and court beauties. Then, again, a certain style of beauty becomes the rage, and-a skilful painter flatters each fair sitter in turn by bringing ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... taken, is so inexpressibly comprehensive, pregnant, and deep—when taken really, so perfectly improbable. It will be likewise difficult to believe that even the old readers of the account—at least those of them who looked deeper and were more enlightened—took with extreme {318} literalness the expression, that God breathed into the nostrils of man who is dust of the ground, the breath of life. The third chapter has still other features from which we have at least to assume that the author did not at all intend to give importance to an extremely literal conception ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... measures of self-defence, and rejection of the right of magistrates and other political officers to inflict punishment. They also adopted, as the Mennonites did, the Sermon on the Mount as the basis of their ethical standard, which they applied with literalness and rigour. They insisted on simplicity of life, the denial of "worldly" occupations or professions, plainness of garb, rejection of the world's etiquette, absence of titles in addressing persons, and equality of men and women, even in public ministry. They introduced the practice of immersion ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... involves naturally much inversion and occasional obscurity, and lacks smoothness; but it seemed to me to give the general reader a better idea of the poem than a mere prose translation would do, in addition to the advantage of literalness. While it would have been easy, by means of periphrasis and freer translation, to mend some of the defects chargeable to the line-for-line form, the translation would have lacked literalness, which I regarded as the most important object.' —Preface ...
— The Translations of Beowulf - A Critical Biography • Chauncey Brewster Tinker
... spell out the experience morning by morning and see what works, word by word, they do learn in the end that being right works, and that bullying does not. Gradually the level or standard of right in business is bound to rise, until people have generally come to take the Golden Rule with the literalness and seriousness that the best and biggest men are already taking it. Department stores that have the moral originality and imagination to guess what people would wish they had bought of them and what they would wish they had sold to them afterward are ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... here given makes no profession of absolute, verbal literalness. One can not transfer a metaphor bodily, head and horns, from one speech to another. The European had to invent a new name for the boomerang or accept the name by which the Australian called it. The ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... vivid to his sister. Elizabeth had once said that Nannie was "born an old maid"; and certainly these tranquil, gently useless years of being very busy about nothing, and living quite alone with her stepmother, had emphasized in her a simplicity and literalness of mind that was sometimes very amusing to the other three friends. At any rate, hers was a pallid little personality—perhaps it could not have been anything else in the household of a woman like Sarah ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... the first intimation which Tom had that anything special was brewing in the neighborhood, and he answered with characteristic literalness, ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... judgment of the "Critical Review" was still more savage in its accuracy.[17] "This is a republication of a dull, profligate Haywoodian production, in which all the males are rogues, and all the females whores, without a glimpse of plot, fable, or sentiment." In its uncompromising literalness the critic's verdict ranks with the learned Ascham's opinion of the "Morte D'Arthur,"—except that it has not been superseded. The same animadversion might be urged against Defoe's "Colonel Jacque" or "The Fortunate Mistress." If Mrs. Haywood sinned against the ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... critically against his great and general success. Such a paragraph as, for instance, the closing one upon page 340 of Vol. II. is very trying to the resources of the translator. Here Mr. Brooks has sacrificed to literalness an opportunity to sort the confused clauses and stop their jostling: this may be done without diluting the sentiment, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... Pollyanna. "My Ladies' Aiders weren't old women—that is, not many of them, so very old," she corrected hastily, her usual proclivity for truth and literalness superseding her anger; "and—" ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... Georgics, Cato and Varro live in Virgil, but with far less of narrow literalness, with far more of rich enthusiasm. We can well believe that the Aeneid was a poem after Augustus's heart, that he welcomed with pride as well as gladness the instalments which, before its publication, he was permitted to ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... apt to attach to a word the first meaning that they learn in connection with it. Only with the increase of experience can a word come to have more than one meaning. Moreover, the child will apply what he hears with fatal exactness and literalness. ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... and concreteness, you should develop facility in gliding from literalness to figurativeness and back again. But you are always to remember that your gymnastics are not to militate against verbal concord. You must never set words scowling and growling at each other through injudicious combinations like this: "She was five feet, four and three-quarter inches ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... saw him the day before yesterday: at least he said nothing to the contrary," answered Alick with his conscientious literalness. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various |
